It took me a long while to write this review. OK, I'll have to admit, I was being a bit lazy, but more importantly - "Concrete" by WHOURKR is the kind of album that one must listen to a lot before it can be digested and understood. Coming across like a Fantomas performed by cyborgs, WHOURKR's music is truly difficult to stomach.

Luckily, once the painful digestion is over, the listener realizes that "Concrete" is actually a brilliant little record. It's like owning a pet hedgehog - you're gonna get hurt by the spikes for the first few weeks and only when you get used to it, you can finally say "this thing is awesome, I'll call him Sonic". "Concrete" is kinda the same - you need to get used to the extreme cybergrind and noise approach before you can finally realize that the band's music is essentially a total deconstruction of extreme music. It's as if a computer was trying to patch together a song from some basic elements with only a few simple templates to go by. The various riffs, beats and insane vocalizations here all can be treated both as sovereign entities and as building blocks in the structure that is the very concept of extreme music. Now, the likes of Alec Empire, The Amenta, Drumcorps and Blacklodge have all tried this sort of thing with varying degrees of success; however, it is for the first time that I hear it in as concise a form as it is on WHOURKR's "Concrete". Obviously, in an album like this, it is completely futile to describe any particular song in detail, so let me just assure you that it all works well together and does the job of commenting on the very rhizome of what extreme music is. As a superficial example, the breaks in a track like "Slaagt" certainly fulfill this purpose.

With all this said, WHOURKR could certainly work on being more user-friendly. It took Alec Empire over a decade to finally come up with something that was as listenable as it was innovative, and perhaps WHOURKR similarly needs some time. Nevertheless, like Jägermeister, "Concrete" will remain to be something special that one needs to get used to but then begins to taste awesome.

Written on 21.03.2009 byjupitreas
With Metal Storm since 2002, jupitreas has been subjecting the masses to his reviews for quite a while now. He lives in Warsaw, Poland, where he does his best to avoid prosecution for being so cool.

I get the same feeling from the band Pig Destroyer and their release Phantom Limb (I am not sure if these two even compare). I just for some odd reason will not completely abandon the album even though I have yet to really accept it.

I'm not at all familiar with the genre - the only thing I know remotely approaching this is The Amenta's n0n - but I like it. It's a "fun" album. Mindfuck!
I'm currently listening to Igorrr and I have to say SteveJoeDave is right, they are even better.

I'm not at all familiar with the genre - the only thing I know remotely approaching this is The Amenta's n0n - but I like it. It's a "fun" album. Mindfuck!
I'm currently listening to Igorrr and I have to say SteveJoeDave is right, they are even better.

Haha, I dunno if I could get used to being called that. Glad you liked Igorrr though ;] The Moisissure album is truly something else.